Needed feature

Eric

There is actually no way to print except by exporting to PNG. And the export is WYSIWYG You have to zoom in quite a bit to end up with something useful.

Being able to print, or export to PDF (something resolution independant) is needed. being able to choose the print area (to print a subset) would be even better.

Dan J Archer

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the feedback. There wasn't time in the development schedule for v2.0 to include the features you're talking about, but there are a few ways to achieve these goals:

You can copy either the whole diagram, the current selection or the currently visible area onto the clipboard: select Copy from the toolbar or from the Edit menu. You can then Paste this into a graphics-compatible application with print capabilities. During the beta, it was recommended by one of our users that Excel is an excellent choice for this task, since it handles printing of such large areas very well.

To chose the print area, you could arrange the display so that the visible area contains only that which you wish to print, just by panning and zooming around the diagram, and temporarily hiding any objects you wish to omit. After pasting into an application such as Excel you can resize the image to the size you want - since it's a vector based image it should scale well in applications which support the vector format we export (EMF or enhanced metafile format).

To export to PDF, repeat the same process but chose as your destination an application which directly supports PDF export. There are a number of them out there (such as popular third party office applications). Alternatively, export the diagram as EMF and use a third party EMF to PDF converter; again there are a number of them available over the net.

Apologies for the fact that this feature isn't in Dependency Tracker. It will be considered as and when we're planning the next major release.

Eric

Hi Dan,

Your workaround works. Took me 30 minutes to get the objects I wanted to print correctly (large db), but it works.

Thanks

That tool has a future :P
I will order my copy this week

Dan J Archer

Hi Eric,

You're most welcome, glad to be of service. Apologies for the slight labour involved here - with a fixed time budget for development we did agonise over which features were vital and which less so. Generally we opted for providing functionality which wasn't available through other means; this does mean that a few tasks like this are a bit more involved. Thanks for persevering!

Cheers,

Dan